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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T20:24:43+00:00

I’m trying to figure out the licensing consequences of using Grails as the base

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I’m trying to figure out the licensing consequences of using Grails as the base for closed-source non-free software. This would be a server product that is downloaded and installed. Users would not have the right to redistribute it or run it as a hosted service.

Grails and Groovy themselves are cool: they’re licensed under ASF 2.0 which is great. However, Grails has a billion dependencies and I’m going crazy tracking them all down.

Grails can generate a list of software that your project depends on by running grails dependency-report. I’m going through that list of dependencies, BUT:

  • Many of the libraries do not list their licenses. So I’m going to each and every library and figuring out its license.
  • I’m guessing dependency-report doesn’t list all the transitive dependencies (libraries that THOSE libraries include, and so on) because they aren’t fully specified in Ivy.

Has anyone gone through this exercise before? Just knowing the end result would be a HUGE help. Actually having a list of all the dependencies and their licenses would be a MASSIVE help.

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I spent a day tracking down all the Grails 1.3.7 dependencies. Here’s the gist:

    • Grails itself has the nice friendly ASF license
    • Some subcomponents use more restrictive licenses
    • However, none of the subcomponents use what I’d call a “showstopper” license like GPL
    • However, some people WOULD consider a few of the licenses to be showstoppers, most notably the LGPL used by Hibernate.

    Lawyers are scared to death of LGPL because it’s easy for developers to make a mistake that forces the entire system to become open source. Things that would trigger this are: modifying any little bit of the LGPL source code, copying any little bit of the source code into your product, or linked to the GPL software “statically” rather than “dynamically” (that’s a long discussion).

    Because of this, some software companies and purchasing departments have rules forbidding its use.

    Here’s the subcomponents with more restrictive licensing than ASF. LGPL’s the worst:

    • Hibernate (LGPL)
    • A bunch of javax stuff (like activation and mail) under CDDL 1.0
    • org.beanshell BSH is SPL
    • javassist is MPL

    Everything else is licensed BSD, MIT or ASF. Those are fine.

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